podcast

One of the five ingredients for building a great biking city is a steady flow of passionate and talented people motivated to shed sweat and tears to make their cities better.

But where do advocates come from?

That’s the question we explore in the latest episode of the BikePortland podcast, which is back after a several-month sabbatical (our volunteer producer, Lillian Karabaic, was busy riding bikes and catching trains in 10 countries, among other things). We’re joined by a native Portlander who thinks about this subject a lot: the cerebral, disarmingly humble executive director of the Community Cycling Center, Mychal Tetteh.

What do you do when a person in a car yields to you at an intersection for no reason?

How do you have a productive discussion with someone who isn’t excited about biking?

If you could get one bike-friendly person in Portland into public office, who would it be?

For the second year, we’ve dedicated an episode of our monthly podcast to answering questions that were, like these, submitted by readers and listeners. So producer Lillian Karabaic, Joathan and I put 20 minutes on my kitchen timer and answered as many as we could before the bell. The result is rapid-fire and fun.

It’s the end of the year, and that means the next couple weeks here on BikePortland will be rich with retrospectives and analysis from 2014 and predictions for 2015.

One of those will be part of a new tradition: the annual question show on our podcast. This is a fun endeavor where the three of us — Jonathan, me, and producer Lillian Karabaic — take questions from listeners and others and address as many as we can, on air, in 25 minutes. The only restriction: the questions somehow have to be about either the year past or the year to come.

Last year, we tackled subjects like proper use of crosswalks, the latest improvements to the Springwater Trail and the Nobel Prize for Physics.

What would happen if every local bridge were tolled?And other speculative but interesting scenarios.(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

We spend all our time on this website writing about things that are true.

So we decided that it’d be fun to spend 40 minutes talking about things that aren’t.

In the latest episode of our monthly podcast, producer Lillian Karabaic, Jonathan and I sat down for a particularly fun game: inspired by this CityLab post, we took turns proposing improbable (but plausible) events that could change the future of Portland transportation and then making educated (though sometimes wacky) guesses about what would happen next.

Bike fun comes in many shapes and sizes in Portland, and it’s impact is profound. This is a scene from a 2009 ride led by our podcast producer Lily Karabaic where she shared the history of the “Benson Bubbler” fountains.(Photos by J. Maus/BikePortland)

With the crazy month of June behind us, our latest edition of the BikePortland Podcast delves into the power of Pedalpalooza and the surprising secrets that make bike fun both a pleasant pastime and a potent pillar of cultural change. (more…)

When you change something about a traffic signal, people don’t notice. They simply obey.

Well, mostly.

Maybe that’s why signals have quietly become one of the most important and unique ways that Portland has made itself a better place for walking, biking and driving cars at reasonable speeds rather than at noisy and unsafe ones.

In this month’s episode of the BikePortland podcast, Jonathan, producer Lillian Karabaic and I interview one of the wizards behind the curtain of Portland’s unusually safe streets: Peter Koonce.

Koonce, the division manager for Portland’s signals and street lighting division and one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet in municipal government, talked with us about all the tricks in the city’s signal system that you never even noticed. And as always, we close with a transportation tip of the month, Lily’s favorite tweets about TriMet and the uncannily appropriate song that Lily found for the subject of the show.

If you are what you wear, being yourself is often a challenge for people who ride bikes.

Armed with the practical tips of guest host Meghan Sinnott, our latest podcast episode is here to help. Sinnott joined producer Lillian Karabaic, Jonathan and me to talk about how to make people say “You got here on a bike?”

We tackle the best heels for biking in; Jonathan’s affection for sport gear (and the times when he decides to abandon it); whether chain guards are necessary; and whether we should “light up our children like road cones” when they hit the road themselves. Even our recording engineer, Brock Dittus, pops in with a tip about men’s pants.

That’s one of the questions we tackle in the BikePortland podcast’s latest episode, about the state of bicycle advocacy in Portland and elsewhere.

“We don’t have a short-term goal for how we want bicycling to get better,” co-host Jonathan Maus says in this month’s half-hour show. “We just sort of follow a shiny object. Oh, Barbur road diet has to happen. Over here, there’s been some tragedy, we have to go focus on Vision Zero. Oh, let’s go talk about 20s Bikeway. There’s no fundamental, organizing principle that everybody can rally around. I think that’s a big gap we have right now.”